This last Saturday, Kay and I made the trip down to San Diego to see Eben Brooks and Allison Lonsdale perform at LeStat’s Café. It was well worth the trip. Maybe I’m just a sucker for geeky and fanish songs, well performed, but I get a blast out of watching those two perform. If anyone is interested and within range (Kay and I drove in from Los Angeles, a round trip of about 250 miles), they perform just about every third Saturday at LeStat’s, and they both have several CDs out. So support your local musician!

Current Mood:cheerful

Current Location:At home, in my little "den"

Current Music:None at the moment...Eben Brooks' JUST ME AND MY GUITAR after I rip it...

I went to two 3-D movies. The latest PIRATES OF THE CAR. movie - the fourth in the series, based on a Tim Powers novel. It was fun, and well worth the time and money, and if you go to it, you really DO want to stay till AFTER the closing credits (an Easter Egg awaits...:-)). The only fault that I could find with this movie that I'll put down here is that I thought the 3-D effect was really more of a "let's do this in 3-D because 3-D is 'in'". It wasn't really part of the story, it was just a stunt.

After the one movie, I was feeling just a little bit silly, and so left, turned around, and went back to purchase another ticket - to KUNG FU PANDA 2. This one was for the belly laughs - and I'll admit that some of the humor was quite low (though I've been known for a long time as someone with a quite low sense of humor). But I did get several belly laughs out of this one, and a few times I laughed so hard that I could barely breath. Much of the classic-style 2-D animation was actually better (artistically) than a lot of the 3-D computer animation. But the animation, at its worst, was still quite good. And it was a GOOD 3-D movie - where the 3-D really was integral, or so I saw it.

Overall, two good movies, and then I headed out to a local (to the theater) all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, Todai's, for dinner. A bit stuffed afterwards, but overall a good time.

I'd pick an FTL starship from my SFRPG campaign (an old OTHER SUNS campaign). Something like an armored scout (crew of 12-20) along with complete maintenance and repair manuals (not to mention equipment to fabricate spare parts, and thousands of tons of extra carrying capacity). With such a vehicle, I wouldn't even have to leave the system in order to have a TON of fun (not to mention starting up my own business hauling satellites into orbit). Gravity control = the solar system is mine. FTL = the nearby stars are mine. Shields capable of deflecting uncharged particles = I can go visit PSR 1257+12 (a pulsar, ~950 light-years away ... that has PLANETS...)

Last week, I went to my dentist with a gum infection. The X-Ray he took of the area worried him - and he referred me to an endodontic specialist (a dentist specializing in root canals). I wasn't particularly thrilled by this turn of events, but it didn't look like something that a sane person would ignore.

My appointment with the endodontic specialist was this morning - and after a careful exam, he said that a root canal was contraindicated. What was indicated was an extraction. He didn't do extractions, just root canals, so he referred me to yet another dental surgeon, who did do extractions. So it was off to the next surgeon, who did his own exam, and after careful consideration, suggested that it would be a good idea to have the affected tooth pulled.

So now I'm sitting here with gauze packed into the gap where my molar used to be, and (thanks to the pain meds the extraction specialist prescribed) feeling not-too-bad. Of course, I'm now short one tooth, but given the condition of the tooth, this is likely the best practical resolution.

I just wish it hadn't happened around tax time (yes, I've still got to finish my taxes).

Today (from the viewpoint of the US/West Coast) Japan was hit by an earthquake. The news is alive with tales of at least one burning refinery, an atomic power plant overheating on the NE coast of Honshu, an 8.9 Earthquake and a massive tsunami that has killed hundreds.

My hopes and best wishes go out to the people of that nation. They were prepared (as much as anyone could have been for one of the five largest earthquakes since 1900), but there have still been far too many casualties.

What am I saying? Mother nature can be a b*tch, and people should remember that no matter how powerful we think we are, no matter how safe we may think we are, the universe is capable of dealing us some pretty unpleasant cards. And now is the time for those of us outside the immediate blast zone to try and provide what help we can to the souls caught at ground zero.

I'm trying to find Bonnie Burchill (former FNC member) to get her permission for use of some artwork she sent me several years ago. If anyone out there reading this has an e-mail address, or a street address that's recent, I'd be most appreciative.

The last address I have for Bonnie (sadly MANY years old) is an address in Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada.

The Governor of Wisconsin has been trying to bust unions for some time, but he doesn't strike me as the sharpest tool in the shed. Why do I say this? It appears as though someone made a prank call to the Governor, pretending to be one of the Koch brothers (the billionaire brothers who have contributed a great deal of money to conservative causes - among which appears to be union busting).

The Governor's intent was not so much to try and fix a budget problem (caused in no small part, it is to be noted, by the Governor's tax cuts to corporations - which turned a state budget surplus into a deficit) as to bust the unions. He was offered, by the public workers' unions, monetary "give backs" that would have basically given in on all his monetary demands in his proposed budget repair bill. But that wasn't enough - he was and still is insistent upon taking away the public workers' unions ability to bargain collectively.

This isn't the first time in his history that the Governor has done this sort of thing - arrange a deficit through corporate giveaways, then use that as an excuse to try and bust a union.

He is, at least, consistent. Consistently opposed to the very existence of unions (public worker unions go first, then the already crippled private industry unions are easy pickings.

His screams about "outside agitators" creating all the problem, of course, reminds me of another group that claimed that all the problems they were experiencing were the result of "outside agitators". Anyone with a memory that extends back fifty or so years will understand.

His scheme to trick the Democrat state senators back into the State is not likely to work, now - he told too much to the prank caller. If I can find the detailed reports of his statements on the Net, I am sure that they can, too. And they are unlikely to fall for a strategy that has now been published. The Governor of Wisconsin may try to whitewash his screwups in responding with what I assume was the truth in this call. I don't think he'll be successful. If he were brighter, he would have jolly well lied (yes, I know - it's not nice, but "how do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips move" - the Governor of Wisconsin should NOT say anything on the phone that he doesn't want to hear on the Internet and shouted from the cable for at least 24 hours).

I'd really hoped to post more frequently to my journal, but (true to form) real life intervened. My main computer is down for the moment (and has been Since Wednesday). I have yet to repair all the damage done by a commercial software package that claimed to work on Windows/VISTA, but while it worked, seemed to have done extensive system damage.

Before today's events in Nevada, the Republicans were planning on scheduling a vote on a bill to repeal the health care law passed last year. While the Republicans have enough votes in the House to pass such a bill (242 representatives are Republican, 193 are Democrat) they do not have enough votes to pass such a repeal bill in the Senate (the Republicans hold 47 Senate seats, and the Democrats hold 53 seats, counting independents who caucus with the Democrats). But even if the Republicans could, by some strange twist of fate, get their bill passed in the Senate as well, there is no chance of the repeal becoming law, since Obama can be expected to veto any such bill, they must be prepared to override the veto.

From: http://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/override_of_a_veto.htmoverride of a veto - The process by which each chamber of Congress votes on a bill vetoed by the President. To pass a bill over the President's objections requires a two-thirds vote in each Chamber. Historically, Congress has overridden fewer than ten percent of all presidential vetoes.

The Republicans would need 290 votes in the House and 67 votes in the Senate to override a Presidential veto, and that would require that the Republicans pick up some 48 Democrat votes in the House and 20 Democrat votes in the Senate -- assuming that every single Republican voted to override a Presidential veto.

This is NOT going to happen. What has happened is that, by refusing to pass a budget, and having a continuing resolution, the funding remains constant from the previous year's budget - in which there WAS no funding for the health care law. So no funding for the law this time. Of course, since the non-partisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimated that the health care law would reduce the deficit, defunding it actually ends up costing the American taxpayer more than funding it would, long term (long term starting the first year).

So don't look for the the Republicans actually repealing the Health Care Law - just expect them to not fund any of its provisions, and to make sure that there's no funding for any government organization intended to regulate the health care industry, or to enforce any provisions of the law. In this fashion, a law may be left on the books, but since no one is paying for it, nothing will be done, and we'll be left with something worse than status quo ante.

On December 30th, my wife and I headed North to Menlo Park to visit some of our friends up in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were worried, just a bit, about the possibility of I-5 being closed (through the Grapevine), but after checking on the weather for the trip up we decided on going through the central valley rather than taking the coast route.

Ok, I decided that we should take the I-5 going up. More the fool, I. My reasoning? The coast route is longer (both in time and distance) and as we were planning on leaving a little later than usual (10 AM instead of my usual 6-7 AM departure time) I thought it would be nice to get in to our destination a bit before the sun went down and everything went pitch black. No battle plan survives five minutes contact with the enemy, though, and we left 45 minutes later than planned.

Now, normally, the run over the Grapevine takes about an hour and a half, and then things speed up (it's about 80 miles from our home to the far side of the pass). Traffic was a little heavier than usual getting out of LA, but I wasn't too worried. We were, after all, leaving a bit later than usual and it was just before New Years. We'd planned on stopping at Grapevine, and eating at the In & Out there (ok, we both have low tastes, some times). But Grapevine was full - of cars. Really full. There was no parking in the lot for the In & Out, and the McD's lot looked similarly full from where I sat, in our car, trying to maneuver around. It took us something like twenty minutes just to get in and out of Grapevine (not really stopping, just driving through). It was an omen of things to come.

Normally, a short distance past Grapevine, the I-5 splits off and goes up to a 70 mile per hour speed limit. It's two lanes each way, and the slower traffic (trucks, mostly) stays at the legal 55 limit for them, and the other lane runs an average of 70-75 (with a few speed demons running upwards of 100 mph). I try to stay in the fast lane, with my cruise control fixed at just about 70, switching to the slow lane to let lunatics pass me every now and then when it's safe.

This time, I didn't have a chance. Traffic was extremely heavy (much more so than I'd ever seen it in the central valley) and traffic speed fluctuated between 30 mph and 65 mph (I may have hit 70 mph once or twice, but never for more than a minute, and I wasn't able to use my cruise control due to traffic conditions).

At that the I-5 North did better than the I-5 South; traffic there looked to be bumper to bumper, almost all the way through the valley (with the exception of one open stretch that turned out to be the result of the CHP running a brief traffic stop to allow a big tow truck to remove a wrecked car and likely to allow someone to remove accident debris). But, seven and a fraction hours after we started, we were at our destination (for only about forty-five minutes more than the usual length of trip). I should have read the omens more carefully... I was pretty tired when we reached a friends house (where we were going to stay for the weekend) but we both quickly unwound. Good friends, a VERY good scotch (thank you, George!), some langosh (a Hungarian garlic bread), salmon pizza, and good conversation later, I was feeling quite a bit better.

For once, thanks to the sanity of my friend George's wife (hi, Ellie!) George and I didn't stay up until midnight or one am talking - I think her hints got us off to rest about 10 or 10:30 PM. Just as well, considering that the next day we'd be staying up until ridiculous (well, past midnight) as is traditional.

We spent Friday doing "little" things (shopping, preparations for an RPG session Friday, and other silly things). Saturday, as had been planned, I ran another session of what we've been calling the Cyberfur campaign. A good time was had by all (George, Ellie, my wife, our friend Lisa - not the Khromat, another one, and me).

Sunday, Kay and I started back (again, rather late in the morning). We'd planned on going back down the I-5, and stopping at Harris Ranch for a late lunch. Our plans took a little detour - before we got to Harris Ranch, we saw the notices on the electronic roadsigns that the I-5 was closed at the Grapevine. We were just North of Kettleman City, so there wasn't much we could do, and we decided to follow our original plan just a little longer.

We ate at Harris Ranch, and MAN but the prime rib was good. We had the open house prime rib sandwiches. I picked that selection for me because it looked like the smallest amount of meat of anything on the menu - 8 ounces. Kay decided to have the same thing, I assume because she noticed the how much meat was on all the other menu items. Mine had a bit more fat and gristle than Kay's - perhaps as much as an ounce. But the remainder made up for it in taste (and even seven ounces of meat is a lot). We were both stuffed, after the meat and fixings that went with it. So, despite the pending detour, we were in a pretty good mood after lunch.

Things didn't stay good for long. We took what turned out to be the best of a very bad deal, and went West on the 41 to the 46 to Pasa Robles and to the 101, starting off the I-5 just South of Kettleman city. It's 53 miles, roughly, off the I-5 to the 101 on that route, but it took us over three hours. Traffic was stopped, mostly. At that, we were "lucky". Had we gone East and tried one of the alternates there, we'd have likely been trapped (most of the alternates ended up closing as well). The detour took us through nowhere to the coast, and with the rain, and the insane traffic, we were both pretty ragged by the time we reached familiar territory. I had to be back at work on Monday, so "the damn fool (me) yelled to push on" (even if we were waist deep at times, figuratively speaking). We made it back in one piece, barely, just a few minutes before midnight (after spending some thirteen hours in transit, with a one hour break for lunch at the Ranch).

I still do not know why the traffic was so heavy, unless people have decided to skip air travel altogether within the State. But, more on that subject another time.

It was fun, it had some bad moments, but it had more really good ones than bad, so we were happy we went. But we were also happy to get home again.

One problem I have with GURPS (as I have with any pure point-build system) is that they are inherently unrealistic and do not match the real world in some very important ways, or they fail to be generally applicable. What do I mean by this?

For real people in the real world, some indivduals have a "talent" for a given skill area and some don't. I spent a good six years trying to learn how to play the guitar and the clarinet. While I learned to play mechanically, there was no "soul" to my playing. I just wasn't any good at all at it, even though I worked hard for a long time. At the same time, I had what I regard as a "natural talent" for mathematics and working with computers - what other people found darn near impossible, I did with ease, and I did it over forty years ago (although I've gotten better with experience, I started at a higher level than most people reach after several years of experience). Some people find learning languages trivial, others remain steadfastly mono-lingual (sometimes despite making considerable efforts to change their skill set). Some people are what John Campbell called "chronosetting" and some are what he called "chronoplastic"; by this, he meant that some people could learn any one set of skills when young, but once learned, they could not continue learning, and some people could continue learning and changing their entire way of live and living well into old age, "reinventing" themselves several times over the decades. The pure point build systems do not accurately reflect any of these real world characteristics. (And before you point out that random-roll or hybrid skill systems don't really handle these problems well - or the problem of unused skills decaying with time - I'll point out that I agree with you). No system I've found yet (including OTHER SUNS) satisfies all my criteria for a "realistic", a "good", and a playable system simultaneously.

So, with points assigned on an "easy", "normal", "hard" basis for skills, we have a disconnect between reality and the game.

At the same time, if the intent is "play balance", then the points assigned to skills are dependent upon the individual campaign and its style. In the simplist case, suppose we have two different campaigns using a simple build-point skill system: there are only two skills available, "killing things and not being killed", and "figuring out things". If the campaign is a set of war/combat scenarios, the former skill has greater campaign value than the latter, if the campaign is a set of police/detective scenarios, then the latter is by far more important. So a set of point-to-skill listings that work for one campaign may well not work for another, if the two have wildly different "game objectives" for the players.

Even if the games are, in theory, identical (two "out of the box" CHAMPIONS campaigns, for example) the "real" value of given skills and powers (and, more importantly, disadvantages) can vary dramatically - especially over time. For the CHAMPIONS example, consider the situation of someone taking a disadvantage of a 1.5 x damage (stun) from a "common" attack. As I learned and played it, up through 4th edition rules, this meant that a villain would show up about every other session that that character was in, with the "common" attack that he took extra damage from. But unless I kept making new villains (or having the old ones break out of jail repeatedly), the hero would quickly run out of villains opposing him with the "common" attack. And if I kept making new villains to replace the ones defeated, using precisely the same power-mixes, they would start looking like they came out of a cookie-cutter-villain-factory (something that I always disliked seeing - both in my own campaigns and in those of other referees).

Now OTHER SUNS has some distinct problems in that people don't lose unused skills (every skill is "like learning to ride a bicycle, you never forget") and the weapons are far too ineffective compared to real world equivalents (particularly in the area of artillery and explosives - they're WAY downsized as to killing power, despite the murderous effects that they do have). Also, like GURPS and the point-build systems, OS doesn't handle the differences in raw talent (although the use of skill modifiers and INT for improvement ameliorates this problem A LITTLE BIT). As I recall, AFTERMATH handled the talent/no-talent problem a bit better than OS in this regard, but it had its own problems.

I'm not happy with any system, but I've long since recognized that a good system will not help a lousy referee, nor a lousy system will not hold back a good referee. And is a reason I am always interested in seeing how other referees handle games (especially in systems, like GURPS, where I haven't as much experience). Even if I don't approach things the same as they do, I might be able to steal some of their techniques, "only, please, to call it research".

(And before anyone out there thinks I'm down on all systems except my own, think again: I loved CHAMPS, and I enjoyed the few SHADOWRUN games I've played in, and I'd love to try someone ELSE'S GURPS campaigns - I just wish that there were a "perfect" system out there somewhere. And yes, I know what I'm asking for, but "a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

It is no surprise to anyone who has known me for a while that I was a big fan of STARGATE SG-1. I stumbled across the following (STARGATE SG-1: TRUE SCIENCE) on HULU, and since it has an "embed" option, I'm going to hook you, the gentle reader, too...

I have been a software engineer now for more years than I care to think about.

Since the improvement in microprocessor capabilities made it possible, much of my work over the last twenty years has been written in C or C++ (much of my work has been in "hard" real-time embedded applications). Prior to roughly 1985, the "hard" real-time applications I worked didn't permit full use of high order languages (CPU utilization constraints were the problem).

It's not that I haven't programmed in other languages (I've almost lost count of the number of assembler languages I've learned and used over the years, and I've used everything from Matlab and Pascal to HAL/S, Basic, and Perl) but I tend to come back to C and C++ because they are simultaneously the most flexible, powerful, and portable of the languages that I use. That's not to say that they don't have their drawbacks. Shooting yourself in the foot is almost trivial in C, and in C++ you can instantiate multiple copies of your feet before you shoot them all at once (Uzis, anyone?).

At the moment, I'm working on a program in Perl to do data validation in a post-processing environment. Since the language of implementation was chosen for me (I would have written the project in C++ given my druthers) I've had to make Perl do handstands to perform tasks that would be far more easily handled in C or C++. Yes, I know, Perl is more suited to regular expression handling (a necessary component of this task as it turns out), but other than having to test my regular expressions carefully each time (something I have to do regardless of the language of implementation), I've learned the "tricks" of regular expression handling in C and C++. But, as they say in the music business, "it's a gig".

So today finds me "playing" with Perl prototypes on my home machine (the Company is on Holiday shutdown, but I've installed Strawberry Perl on one of my home machines, and I just can't resist programming). I suppose that this is much the way some writers feel; they can't help writing, and don't feel good about themselves unless they have written something lately. So even if I'm not getting paid for doing this (right now), I'm still spending time on the computer writing code. But I do so ENJOY it when a plan (or a program) comes together!